Prerequisite:
Students must have completed the Lead: People, Teams, Organizations
(B6500) core class. The class is best suited to students taking
leadership roles during the MBA experience (club officer, cluster
officer, peer advisor, etc.).

Leadership
roles can involve a wide range of communication challenges— mentoring a
struggling colleague, persuading investors of your brand, rallying an
auditorium of new employees, working the room at an industry event,
handling tough questions from the media, running team meetings in ways
that elicit candid conversation and learning.

While
all of us at CBS are strong communicators, few of us are adept at all
these different kinds of communication. The goal of this class is to
broaden your repertoire, to make you a more versatile communicator who
can adapt your way of communicating to meet many different challenges.

The
world is full of communication experts: actors, screenwriters, coaches,
political speechwriters, networkers, public relations experts,
diplomats and so forth. This class draws on these different crafts and
professions looking for tools and methods that help in the kinds of
situations business leaders face.

We aim to develop
two kinds of knowledge--conceptual understanding and procedural skill.
Each session will involve some class discussion about frameworks cases
and some active participation in exercises. We rely on role-play
simulations and personalized feedback (from peers and through video) to
practice and polish the behavioral skills.

Our first topic, for instance, is story. We
introduce concepts of story structure (e.g. protagonist, five-act
structure, sensory details) and apply these to topics you anticipate
speaking on as a leader (e.g. Who am I? Why hire me? What makes our
organization different?). Then we practice delivering our stories with
impact (silence, vocal variety, visuals). Keeping this dual emphasis on
concepts and performance, we move on to topics such as coaching, public
speaking, networking and making an impact in small groups, facing
audiences during crises, and leading meetings.

Brad Aspel teaches MBA courses on Leadership Communication and is one of the Executive Coaches for the Executive Education program's Columbia Management Institute (CMI). He also teaches workshops on Communication & Presentation skills. Brad started his career as an actor (including five Broadway shows) and theatrical director with a particular focus on developing talent. He worked in Media & Entertainment for multiple companies...